How To Close All Tabs In iOS Safari With A Single Tap

Safari on iPhone and iPad is one of the simpler mobile browsers around today. Although recent updates to iOS did make a few notable improvements to the browser, it still isn’t up to par with the mobile variants of Chrome and Firefox or the likes of Dolphin Browser when it comes to number of features and flexibility.

iOS users who are jailbroken, however, have access to a host of tweaks developed to change that. While some of these remove or alter UI elements that certain users might find annoying, others aim to boost productivity or convenience by adding a completely new feature or option to the mix. A good example of the latter would be the new jailbreak tweak Safari Close All Tabs by TapSharp.

Available for free on Cydia’s BigBoss repository, this iOS 9 tweak, as its name suggests, allows you to quit all tabs within the stock iOS browser in a couple of taps. It adds an “X” button to Safari’s tab view, right beside the “+” at the bottom, tapping which displays a confirmation prompt. Another tap on the Close Tabs option here will quit all open tabs in one go, leaving you with a single new tab. Unlike other similar tweaks (CloseAll, for example), this one offers an option to whitelist individual tabs, for situations where you might have a couple important tabs open but would still like to clear up the clutter.

To whitelist a tab, simply tap and hold it with two fingers till the lock icon in its top-left corner turns red. Note that this is only meant to prevent it from being closed when you hit the “X” button; you can still kill locked tabs the conventional way – dragging them off to the left or right of the screen.

While the button in the bottom bar gels quite nicely with the rest of the UI, the lock icon may look out of place whenever you have more than two tabs open at the same time. It doesn’t transform all that well with the pseudo-3D effect that you see in Safari’s tab view and may at times overlap with the beginning of webpage titles. It’s a minor imperfection that isn’t likely to keep you up at night, but since the tweak doesn’t come with a configuration menu, you can’t simply turn it off when it does bother you. If and when that happens, you’ll have to remove it from within Cydia.

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